"Hmm?"
"Check this out."
Marrity looked at her, then past her at the cement slab; his face went blank. He put the box down on the shelf. "Is that real? " he said softly.
She tried to think of a funny answer, then just shrugged. "I don't know."
He was staring at the slab. "I mean, isn't the real one at the Chinese Theater?"
"I don't know."
He glanced at her and smiled. "Sony. But this might be real. Maybe they made two. She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died."
"Where did he die?"
"In Switzerland, goof. I wonder if these letters—" He paused, for Daphne had got down on her hands and knees and begun prying up the bricks along the edge of the exposed patch of wet dirt. "What?" he said. "Gold?"
"She almost burned up the shed," Daphne said without looking up. "Got the cap off the gas can, at least."
"Well — true." Her father knelt beside her, on the bricks instead of the mud—which Daphne was pleased to see, as she didn't want to wash a fresh pair of pants for him to wear to work tomorrow — and pulled up a couple of bricks himself. His dark hair was falling into his eyes, and he streaked a big smudge of grime onto his forehead when he pushed it back. Great, Daphne thought; he looks — probably we both look — as if we just tunneled out of a jail.
Daphne saw a glint of brightness in the flat mud where one brick had been, and she rubbed at it; it was a piece of wire about as thick as a pencil. It was looped, and she hooked a finger through it to pull it up, but the rest of the loop was stuck fast under the other bricks.
"Is this gold?" she asked her father.
He grunted and rubbed more dirt off the wire. "I can't say it's not," he said. "Right color, at least, and it's pliable."
"She said you should get the gold up from under the bricks, right? So let's—"
From outside, on the street, a car horn honked three times, and then a man's voice called, "Frank?"
"It's your uncle Bennett," said her father, quickly slamming back into place the bricks he had moved. Daphne fit hers back in too, suppressing a giggle at the idea of hiding the treasure from her dumb uncle.
The bricks replaced, her father leaped up and grabbed all the papers in the ammunition box into one fist and shoved them deep into an inside pocket of his jacket on the shelf. He wiped his hand on his shirt, and Daphne remembered that he had said the envelopes were sticky.
"Stand back," he said, and Daphne stepped back beside the television set.
Then he cautiously put one foot on the square of black dirt and gripped the cement slab by the top edges and pulled it toward himself. It swayed forward, and then he hopped backward out of the way as it overbalanced and thudded heavily to the floor, breaking one row of bricks. The whole shed shook, and black dust sifted down onto the two of them from the rotted ceiling.
The block's near edge was visibly canted up, resting on the row of broken bricks.
"Both of us," said Daphne, sitting down on the bricks to set her heels against the raised edge. Her father knelt on the bricks and braced his hands on the slab.
"On three," he said. "One, two, three."
Daphne and her father both pushed, and then pushed harder, and at last the slab shifted, slid to its original position and thumped down flush with the bricks. Its top face was dry and blank.
Daphne heard the click of the backyard gate, and she scrambled up and ran two steps to the VCR and hit the eject button. The machine whirred as her uncle's footsteps thrashed through the weeds, and then the tape had popped out and Daphne snatched it and dropped it into her purse as her father hastily grabbed his jacket from the shelf, slid his arms into the sleeves and shrugged it onto his shoulders.
"Frank!" came Bennett's shout again, this time from just outside the open door. "I saw your car! Where are you?"
"In here, Bennett!" Daphne's father called.
Her uncle's red face peered in under the sagging door lintel, and for once his expression was simply wide-eyed dismay. His mustache was already spiky with sweat, though he would have had the air conditioner on in his car.
"What the fuck's going on?" he yelled shrilly. "Why the — bloody hell does it smell like gasoline in here?" Daphne guessed that he was embarrassed at having said fuck, and so hurried to cover it with his habitual bloody — though he wasn't British. "You've got Daphne with you!"
"Grammar left the top off a gas can," her father said. "We were trying to get some ventilation in here."
"What was that almighty crash?"
Her father jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "The window fell out when I tried to open it."
"Sash weights," put in Daphne.
"Why are you even here?" Bennett demanded. He ducked in under the lintel and stood up inside; the shed was very crowded with three people in it.
"My grandmother called me this morning," said Marrity evenly, "and asked me to come over and look at the shed. She said she was afraid it was going to burn down, and with that uncapped gasoline can in here, it might have."
Daphne noted the details of her father's half lie; and she noted his emphasis on my grandmother — Bennett had only married into the family.
"It's a little academic at this point," snapped Bennett, "and there's nothing valuable out here." He looked more closely at Daphne and her father, presumably only now noticing the dust in their hair and the mud on their hands, and suddenly his eyes widened. "Or is there?"
His hand darted out and pulled the videocassette from Daphne's purse. "What's this?"
Daphne could read the label on it: Pee-wees Big Adventure. It was a movie she'd seen in a theater two years ago. "That's mine," she said. "It's about bad people stealing Pee-wee's bicycle."
"My daughter's not a thief, Bennett," her father said mildly. Daphne reflected that right now she was a thief, actually.
"I know, sorry." Bennett tossed the cassette, and Daphne caught it. "But you shouldn't be here," he said to her father as he bent down to step out of the shed, "now that she's dead." From outside he called, "Not unless Moira and I are here too."
Marrity followed him outside, and Daphne was right behind him.
"Who's dead?" asked her father.
Bennett frowned. "Your grandmother. You don't know this? She died an hour and a half ago, at Mount Shasta. The hospital just called me — Moira and I are to fly up this afternoon and take care of the funeral arrangements." He peered at his brother-in-law. "You really didn't know?"
"Mount Shasta, at like" — Marrity glanced at his watch — "noon? That's not possible. Why would she be at Mount Shasta?"
" She was communing with angels or something — well, that turned out to be right. She was there for the Harmonic Convergence."
Behind the grime and the tangles of dark hair, Frank Marrity's face was pale. "Where's Moira?"
"She's at home, packing. Now if we want to avoid things like restraining orders, I think we should all agree—"
"I'm going to call her." He started toward the house, and Daphne trotted along behind him, clutching her Pee-wee videocassette.
"It'll be locked," Bennett called after him.
Daphne's father didn't answer, but pulled his key ring out of his pants pocket.
"You've got a key? You shouldn't have a key!"
Grammar's house was a white Spanish adobe with a red-tile roof, and the back patio had a trellis shading it, tangled with roses and grapevines. Over the back door was a wooden sign, with hand-carved letters: Everyone Who Dwells Here Is Safe. Daphne had wondered about it ever since she had been able to read, and only last summer she had found the sentence in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, "The Maiden Without Hands." The sentence had been on a sign in front of the house of a good fairy who had taken in a fugitive queen and her baby son.